Highlights from the Archives

In “The Finder,” as in earlier thrillers like “Manhattan Nocturne” and “The Havana Room,” Colin Harrison combines a Balzacian eye for social detail and a poet’s sense of mood with a sleazily sensationalistic plot.

With ''Bodies Electric'' (1993), ''Manhattan Nocturne'' (1996), ''Afterburn'' (2000) and now ''The Havana Room,'' Colin Harrison is trying to do for New York what Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy have done for Los Angeles: map the sinister underbelly of the city, the nexus of greed and lust and ambition that metastasizes there and its dark spawn of larceny and murder.

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April 13, 2008, Sunday

In “The Finder,” as in earlier thrillers like “Manhattan Nocturne” and “The Havana Room,” Colin Harrison combines a Balzacian eye for social detail and a poet’s sense of mood with a sleazily sensationalistic plot.

To the Editor: Regarding ''Are 15 Decks Enough Entertainment for a 13-Year-Old?'' (Essay: Cruising With a Teenager, Oct. 2): It's unfortunate that American kids are allowed to dictate the terms of major vacations. Kid-centered family trips are one...

October 16, 2005, Sunday

ON Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, ''My Life,'' bulls its way into bookstores with advance orders for two million copies. Comparisons are inevitably being made with another memoir, his wife's. Last year, Hillary Rodham...

February 15, 2004, Sunday

THE HAVANA ROOM By Colin Harrison Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($24, hardcover) I flagged down a cab near the Plaza Hotel. The school was only 20 blocks away, and I knew it well, for it was one that Timothy might have gone to when he'd gotten...